Uninterruptible power supplies

[tabbypurr]

not really. You missed it completely, your ego won't let you admit it & that is pretty obvious to anyone that read it. I'm done. Come back with some diy content.

[T i m]

<snip>

Yup really.

Where 'it' was a playground level 'joke' using an Americanism. Yes I did.

I did when it was raised and I did again just then?

You could be right. Not sure how many bothered though?

Is that another joke? It sounds like one?

Who says?

BTW, it was 'd-i-y content' till you threw in yer playground / American 'joke'. Please don't (bother to) do it again, or only come back when it's actually funny (to an adult). ;-)

Now, if the UPS software was called 'BALL' or 'BOLOX' then *maybe* your 'joke' would have actually been funny (again, only to under 5's possibly). <weg>

Cheers, T i m

[T i m]

In this (and only on this sort of thing *ever*) you are sort right.

I was having a serious / technical discussion about UPS monitoring software and NT jumped in with something that wasn't funny (to me anyway, even if I had got that is was supposed to be) and it's quite likely that NT would have found configuring APCUPSD or NUT 'a pain' and so I responded to his comment literally.

So, I did allow my RBD to guide my response when I should have used some LBD to 'study' the scenario closer (but I wouldn't have been bothered to etc).

But well done to you for actually getting how L/RBD might impact how someone might interpret something (rather than your normal completely abstract weirdo BS).

Cheers, T i m

[Commander Kinsey]

I've had files corrupted which were being written to when a powercut occurred. Therefore I got a UPS and have never experienced the same again. I then realised since the UPS has much more output than the computer needed, I could run my lighting circuit off it aswell. My LED bulbs now last 5 years instead of 6 months. It not only removes spikes, surges, and brownouts, but it will adjust the voltage when it's wrong.

[whisky-dave]

and not sort left, I've seen that function somewhere..... a bit like shift left or shift right.

Well I was reading it, although not having or much experience of such systems, although we did have a fire here a couple of years ago when the air con failed and the UPS overheated and set fire to a room in the library and some servers got damaged.

I tghought that was a sleep dis-order.

I'm not sure how wearing a little black dress would help but each to his/her own of course.

Happens here all the time some don't realise what's happening or whether it is or not.

From your POV you mean, that was another point I was making.

and trying to work out whether you mean someone isn't making sense or where they talking nonsense.

I did see the bit about UPS to possibley mean the postal service or perhaps the unique selling point typo.

[tabbypurr]

oh dear

[Roger Hayter]

It is hard to see how people who believe themselves to be empathic can be so obsessively rigid and intolerant in their thinking.

[T i m]

<snip>

I think you would have to actually consider the bigger picture(s) before you could reach that conclusion Roger [1].

Let's review what happened in this case ...

I was having a serious discussion with the grown-ups <g> and NT jumped in with his 'joke'.

I missed that it was a joke (for reasons explained previously) and (we) continued with the serious discussion.

Then NT jumped back in because he was 'upset' (?) because I had missed the fact that is was supposed to be 'humour' ...

"I take it you completely missed the moment of mild humour. Rest snipped"

And when I explained I had missed it because I didn't find such levels of humour ('mild' in his own words) funny, to the point where I might miss it as such, he then goes on to accuse me of some sort of egotism, in spite of the fact I'd acknowledged I'd missed it as humour from the beginning?

And when he had first replied with the 'joke' I missed, I asked him how he would do it and carefully explained how it could be used.

So, as is often the case we have cause and effect and which of us had taken the subject off topic and then had the audacity to suggest he'd only carry on if brought back on to d-i-y, especially when every one of my replies contained smilies to indicate how 'light hearted' *I* was being?

In the middle of a serious / useful discussion about UPS's:

You wrote: "NUT is less painless."

NT: "sounds like a pain in the ...."

A pain in the nut to me? [2]

ROTFL ..... Bwhahahahaha ....!!! <weg>

Oh NT, you crack me up .... <rolls eyes>

Better Roger? ;-)

Cheers, T i m

[2] I didn't realise NT suffered with monorchism? (Oh how we all laughed again ...) ;-) [1] For nearly every other instance you might think you have found of my 'intolerance' is more likely to be a balance of who might have a right to impart themselves on someone else in a negative way. Like smokers do to non smokers, cat owners do to non cat owners or a minority of the electorate who can decide the future for the majority. It is *they* who are demonstrating a lack of consideration and empathy to others, not those forced to put up with it.

[tabbypurr]

rewriting history won't cut it.

[T i m]

It doesn't need to princess, it's there for everyone to see.

On that, maybe you need to grow a pair. ;-)

Cheers, T i m

[Roger Hayter]

snip

Sounds like the sort of rationalisation that concentration camp guards had to do every morning. You seem to have difficulty in seeing these offenders as actually people like yourself. This is fair enough, but to then claim a special ability to empathise is bizarre.

[T i m]

How strange (and brings us very close to activating Godwin's law <g>).

I do? Ok, playing along, could you give me an example of how / where you have seem me being an 'offender' in the same way as say smokers or cat owners? In a real tangible way I mean, not offending someone's sensibilities with the truth on the Internet?

I have never made any such claim Roger and you suggesting such further emphases (to me anyway) that you still aren't willing or able to see the bigger picture?

Cheers, T i m

[T i m]

On Thu, 29 Aug 2019 15:21:20 +0100, "Commander Kinsey" [e-mail]> wrote: <snip>

Can that not depend on the UPS though? Some do provide some passive filtering but only produce any output themselves when the power fails ('Offline').

Others are more as you describe where they are maintaining the output themselves all the time and so can do as you say ('Online').

I believe there are pros and cons to both types. Offline consume less energy as all they need to do is keep the battery trickle charged and switch to the inverter output when required. There can be a switchover delay and some equipment can be sensitive to this.

So, given that many old UPS's don't produce a very clean (non sine wave) output, Offline UPS's can be better long term as they only subject the equipment to such when they are called for (the equipment running directly from the mains till that happens).

Later UPS's may produce a cleaner, more sinusoidal output etc.

Cheers, T i m

[NY]

I'm considering getting a UPS for my computers, router, Raspberry Pi etc because our village gets an inordinately large number of supply interruptions: I've logged 5 in the last week. Typically they only last a couple of seconds, but that is enough to make computers reboot.

I've complained to phone number 105 (for Northern Powergrid) and been told that it's due to "work on the HV supply", "bird strike on a cable", "tree falling on a cable" and "lightning strike" (the last even when there's not been a storm in the area). I think it's a random excuse generator. If "bird strike" and "falling tree" are genuine, they must be *very* unlucky for there to be 5 power cuts since 24 August - plus all the ones before I started keeping a note of them.

Next time I'll ask to speak to someone more senior who can tell me *why* our village is affected so badly by power interruptions, and what Northern Powergrid are doing to make their system more resilient to such faults.

So far I've been very lucky to avoid corrupted files, because on one occasion I was defragging a hard disc at the time the power went off, but being NTFS it was more resilient to corruption, though the first thing I do after each power cut is "chkdsk /f c:" for each drive letter just in case (and I've never yet seen it say that it has had to correct any errors).

First rule of any UPS is to check periodically that the battery is holding its charge, and to keep the battery charged. My wife bought a UPS when she bought a PC about 10 years ago, and we never got round to connecting or testing the UPS for about 18 months, by which time it was out of warranty. When I tried it, I found that the battery would not supply AC mains even for a 60 W bulb for more than about 2 seconds :-( We should have kept it plugged in to keep the battery charged, and tested its output every so often by switching off the input - that would have detected dead-on-arrival and premature failure.

[T i m]

Dad was given one by his local electricity supplier because they were repeatedly interrupting his supply and when working from home that was costing / risking his business.

Great.

I'd guess the answer to that might be 'everything we can sir' = 'nothing'.

As you say, if a FS is 'journaled (I think they call it) then it should be reasonably robust.

And flatter than a pancake I suspect?

Quite, but isn't hindsight a wonderful thing. ;-(

It's the same thing as when I go to one of my motorbikes and find the battery flat > ruined. 'If only I had:

Taken the battery off, brought it inside and kept it on charge.

Hooked it up to a suitable solar trickle charger.

Rigged up an external socket for a temporary charger.

Run the LV side of an automatic charger out to the bike(s) ...

Ridden the bikes more frequently ... ;-(

Cheers, T i m

[charles]

My UPS - an ebay purchace - is an APC one and it self-tests its battery.

Actually I've got 2; one for my desk computer monitor and a small one form the incoming FTTC router.

[NY]

I think the best analogy would be a bucket with a huge hole in the bottom so it won't hold any water.

With hindsight we should have kept the UPS and bought a new battery for it, rather than chucking the whole thing in the skip. But then that may have been money down the drain if the problem was a faulty charging circuit or a faulty DC-to-AC inverter.

If I'd still had my oscilloscope I'd have looked at the output to see what shape of waveform was being generated and how it varied as load was applied. But that had gone to the skip a few years earlier as I never used it - and it was bloody big and heavy to store in the loft. I remember buying it from a back-street Army surplus shop somewhere near Cemetery Junction in Reading soon after I got my first job.

[T i m]

That also works. ;-)

But why ... ;-(

I've had to partly disassemble a UPS before to get the swollen / corroded batteries out and the UPS itself has always been fine. ;-(

True, but nothing you couldn't have tested initially with just a voltmeter?

Well, that could have been step two (after proving it was working in general) and if it worked then I'd suspected it would do what it was supposed to do? Nothing wrong with making sure of course.

I have bought several second hand UPS's very cheap because they were fitted with known dead batteries because I can usually cover the cost of the UPS with the scrap value of the batteries. ;-)

Not something I would expect to see in such a place.

Cheers, T i m

[NY]

Ours was an APC - I think it was 700 VA. I've no idea how long it was

*supposed* to power a computer for - presumably at least long enough to trigger and complete an orderly shutdown of the OS. In my case, the answer was "a few microseconds for a 60 W load" :-(

Annoyingly, my router and computer are in separate rooms so I'd need two UPSes like you. Hopefully any modern UPS is able to provide a glitch-free transition from mains to battery, otherwise it's no benefit because the computer will still crash during the changeover, even if it then comes back for while until the battery goes flat or the mains comes back.

In our case, almost every power interruption has been for about 5 seconds - I think only one was for as long as 5 minutes: just long enough to feel my way in the pitch dark from my study through the lounge and kitchen to the bedroom where I knew there was a torch. And just as I got there and turned it on, the power came back.

[charles]

my original reason for getting a UPS was because we used to get glitches overnight which usually frightened my old ADSL router in going into lockout. Since it wasn't easily accessible, rebooting it was tedious. I continue to use a UPS since I statrted doing DTP work for others, I don't want to have to redo 5 minutes work if everything died.